When we reboot the Rivers of America series to get the previously overlooked rivers in there, Bigredfutbol has The Platte. You can have the Snake.
The Niobrara is prettier. I've probably spent more time on the Republican than any other river other than the Platte. So I've got Nebraska covered.
And now I'll bring it back to a book I revisited over the summer in which both the Platte and the Niobrara is covered: Old Jules by Mari Sandoz. I didn't re-read the whole thing but I was going through my old grad school books and picked this one up. I read it in a seminar about the sense of place, and boy did the book deliver on that. I know any romantic notions of the frontier were dashed when it came to the frontier of the Nebraska Sandhills, but what I was curious about this summer as I decided what to keep and what to purge was whether my thinking about the Sandhills was whether the portrait of Jules - a pretty despicable guy - tainted my thoughts about the terrain. I couldn't decide. He's just as terrible a human in the revisitation as before, and the Sandhills are just as forbidding as before, and the link between them in my mind just as strong as before.
The only American river (south of the 49th parallel) that flows into the Pacific that ranks at all is the Columbia.
I’m not sure what you mean by “ranks” but the Colorado flows into the Pacific, or at least it used to. The book series also includes the Sacramento, American, and Salinas.
The Susquehanna, a book about a river I have walked over on a bridge (in Cooperstown, NY, at the headwater about a block east of the Baseball Hall of Fame) by Carl Carmer. Not bad. Less of the casual racism that is all to common to books written in this era, also structured a bit differently from most (Carmer starts at the mouth of the river where it empties into the Chesapeake bay and proceeds chronologically based on largely English settlement patterns, whereas most proceed with historical anecdotes starting at the headwater). Typical of the entertaining way of telling history, though of course there will be the occasional cringy paragraph because in those days it seems to have been hard for people to resist racist tendencies... largely because it wasn't recognized as racism to call the local Indians "savages" and to act as if Black people are at best humans at a lower level of development.
Now that you mentioned it, I might have walked over the river there, too, only for minor league baseball, not soccer.
America For Americans by Erika Lee. It's a history about xenophobia in the US. She argued that there is a long history of American xenophobes, ending in Donald Trump. Looks to be an exciting read.
Sierra Six - Mark Greaney A villain, presumed dead, from 12 years earlier returns to Court Gentry's life and leads to a crazy series of events across Algeria and India as the Gray Man tries to keep a massive dirty bomb from being released in the financial district of Mumbai. An interesting approach and the book alternates between the first encounter with the villain 12 years earlier, which was the first mission for Court as part of the Ground Branch, and the modern day story. These books pretty much are what they are and that's just fine. 2 more to go to be caught up in time for the release of the 14th book in February.
I checked this short story collection out of the library thinking it was Adam Johnson's novel The Orphan Master's Son, vaguely remembering he won the Pulitzer Prize for it but not what it was about. And the title was right there: But it was Fortune Smiles, and it was pretty damn good. Disturbing as heck in a couple of the stories, interesting in others, and both in some including the last story which featured some North Korean expats in Seoul. Enough so that I went and got the novel too, once I figured out it was about North Korea. I can't quite decide what I think of the novel. Johnson did something amazing in getting me to believe what transpired was entirely believable in North Korea, even though none of us has any idea and it would be implausible anywhere else. But I don't trust that feeling, which is why I am ultimately not sure what I think of it. I enjoyed it though, very much.
I was a rising High School Freshman in High School in the summer of 1984. It was a special summer for me since I was finally old enough to enjoy the a summer as teenager. I was more aware of the world, especially toward sports. Before diving into the book, I was already familiar with Michael Jordan's Olympic appearances, his draft into the Bulls, and the groundbreaking Nike contract that revolutionized sports sponsorships and elevated the significance of sportswear brands in popular culture. I was not aware that Bird and Magic played their first ever NBA Finals that summer, but i understood the significance of it in the history of basketball The book discussed numerous remarkable aspects of the Los Angeles Olympics, hailing it as the greatest ever. For me personally, the Los Angeles Olympics held a profound significance, as I was too young in 1976 to grasp the magnitude of the Games, and the 1980 Olympics faced a boycott from most Western nations, making the LA Olympics essentially my inaugural Olympic experience. Carl Lewis, briefly mentioned in the book, stood as a personal hero of mine. Nevertheless, I was conscious of the Soviet Union and East Germany's boycott, which resulted in the absence of some of the world's finest athletes, showcasing that the Olympics were not as perfect as portrayed in the book. I found the book to be heavily focused on American perspectives and experiences. The book dedicated considerable attention to tennis, a sport I avidly followed in 1984. However, I was uncertain about the lasting impact of the significant events that unfolded in the sport during that year on its overall history. I mentioned tennis because of its appeal outside the United States. It discussed Martina Navratilova as one of the first openly lesbian athletes, but her coming out was not necessarily linked to the year 1984. The book omitted any reference to the European Championship held that summer when France clinched victory in a commanding manner. The French team of 1984 is undoubtedly regarded as one of the greatest national teams in history, although it was not the most significant team in the sport's history. Certainly, the book should devote some pages to the topic. The book failed to mention that Ayrton Senna made his F1 debut that year. In that summer, he piloted the unfancied Toleman to a second-place finish in Monte Carlo, one of F1's greatest races. The race was controversially stopped on lap 31 for safety reasons, giving the victory to Senna's future rival Alan Prost. Please do not forget that F1 was probably bigger internationally than the NBA in 1984, which made the incident more important than the Final between Bird and Magic. So, the story deserved a mention if the book was more focused on the perspectives of sport outside the United States.
Just finished this one and liked it, thought it was the most Le Carre-esque of the Slough House novels, don't want to spoil things. Next up is 4th book of Wheel of Time, say your prayers
White Noise - Don DeLillo This book won the National Book Award, but I don’t see what all the noise was about.
You had to be there. . .seriously. . . That sort of trend setting fiction from the 70s and 80s has not aged well.
A bit of a break from Rivers books because 1) our inter-library loan librarian picked an inconvenient time to go on vacation and 2) I saw this in the public library . . . Too Much Too Young: The 2Tone Records Story of Rude Boys, Racism, and the Soundtrack of a Generation, a great book about some of my favorite music from my college years (it being the only music I could actually dance to) by English music journalist Daniel Rachel. Nice work by him, focused mostly on The Specials but also Madness, The Selecter, as well as a few bands that didn't get much play in the US (The Bodysnatchers, and all female band that barely learned how to play their instruments when they broke up) as well as The English Beat, who released a single on 2Tone before signing with a different label. Most interesting thing for me is that The Selecter, much to the future regret of most of their band members, could have been a model for the book (by Roddy Doyle) and subsequent movies, The Commitments. Oh: and at one point the label was criticized for "ripping off" black music and musicians, specifically calling out The Specials and The Selecter. The Selecter says, what???? Damn. That one white dude must be seriously exploitative.
Pauline Black is quite possibly my favorite person on the planet. I got to meet her a few years back and she was just as wonderful as I hoped she would be.
She was also having none of it when NME was accusing 2Tone of exploiting Black musicians. Rhoda Dakar of The Bodysnatchers is pretty cool, too. I knew very little about them since they weren’t as widely available as The Specials, The Selecter, Madness, or The (English) Beat.
Only the Dead - Jack Carr The 6th book in the Terminal List series, and probably the best so far. Carr takes an interesting approach in having his lead character almost entirely absent for the first 130ish pages. Using a self-aware and self-learning AI as a MacGuffin worked here but it could get a bit too convenient if it's overused. The unveiling of the plot of a group of loosely connected Russians and Americans manipulating the world was done really well. The motivations for the Russian characters especially was interesting, including their plan for a nuclear bomb to distract the US from the Ukranian invasion, allowing Russia to take Ukraine and China to take Taiwan was so well laid out that I feel like Carr pulled it directly from his time as a SEAL. The only slight disappointment was the big "twist" in the Epilogue was obvious about 80 pages earlier.
The Librarianist by Patrick deWitt. It's a novel about a recently retired librarian who volunteers at senior center and the events that ensue. Goodreads didn't seem to like it, though there were several positive reviews in the book. Looks interesting.
Well, long story short... trend setting fiction rarely works for people in the future. There are many exceptions. A lot of those exceptions are what get classified as "literature."